Advent has begun! All of us who have been through Advent before are accustomed to the four candles on the Advent wreath and four weeks of Advent. But if you looked at the calendar, or read or heard some of the hints that I have given over the past few weeks, we do not have four full weeks of Advent this year. In fact, the 4th Sunday of Advent will begin with the Vigil Mass on the 23rd and end on Sunday morning, the 24th. That means that your last candle on the Advent wreath won’t get much use this year! On the afternoon of the 24th, we begin our celebration of Christmas with the Christmas Eve Masses.
With such a short season of Advent this year, the question to ask ourselves is: How will we make the most of every day of Advent? How will we prepare ourselves in a spiritual way? It would certainly be easy this year to skip over Advent and just go straight into a Christmas mode. It’s certainly tempting to do this isn’t it? Christmas is usually a joyous time of the year (and many of us remember Fr. Bill telling us how much he loved Christmas). I can guarantee you that Fr. Bill is counting down the days. Yet the Church gives us these days to prepare ourselves. It's a time to pray, to reflect, and appreciate what God did for us by sending His Son! We are truly missing out on helping our spiritual life grow if we just skip over all of these days of preparation.
One way that we can prepare ourselves is with the Sacrament of Penance. You may have noticed the schedule for the Kalamazoo area Penance Services in the bulletin. St Catherine will be having our Advent Penance Service this coming Wednesday, December 6th at 6:30 p.m. This will be a great way to prepare oneself for the upcoming celebration of Christmas. But if this date and time doesn’t work for you, please check the schedule and see if a Penance Service on another day and time will work for you. Preparing for Christmas certainly means that we need to prepare our hearts.
In next week’s column, I will be explaining how the 4th Sunday of Advent and how the Christmas Mass schedule is going to work with this particular year. Please stay tuned! Thanks for reading!